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Legal professionals need to communicate face to face or on the telephone with clients and other lawyers about issues that are often of great financial and personal consequence. They need to be able to understand the concerns of their clients, to explain complex legal concepts in unambiguous language, to offer appropriate advice and to adopt a suitable level of formality or informality. With other legal professionals they need to be able to clarify whether parties have a common understanding of the issues, premises and concepts under discussion. This course focuses on common language-based areas of miscommunication and offers tactics for reducing the threat.
The course is aimed at recently qualified lawyers with a proficient command of English and who, in the course of their work, communicate regularly face-to-face or on the telephone with native and non-native speakers in English.
This module is designed to help participants identify their weaknesses and strengths when communicating in spoken English. On completion of the course participants should have an increased awareness of what can lead to communication misfires and how to avoid them.
The course presents participants with a series of speaking and discussion tasks relating to legal issues, in pairs and small groups, and provides detailed feedback. Individual personal feedback focuses on those areas of error which could lead to serious misunderstanding (typically, phonological, semantic, temporal, modal and selection of an inappropriate register). Group feedback looks at the effectiveness of the interactions and offers tactics for improving it.
The approach is essentially task-based.
- Personal introductions and an analysis of individual weaknesses
- Building the relationship through conversation, including turn-taking and small-talk
- The language of meetings, including conventions, signals and behaviour labelling
- Telephoning, checking and clarifying
- Explaining and paraphrasing
- Giving advice and offering recommendations
- Register, including diplomatic, formal and informal language
- Cultural variation and identifying underlying assumptions
ENGLISH COMMUNICATION SKILLS FOR LAWYERS is available as a one day course for experienced lawyers and as a two-day course for junior lawyers. Please see the LTD-Acadamy website for dates and locations of our public courses (www.ltd-academy.nl). Our in-company programmes are tailored to your company’s requirements and are available throughout the year. We would be happy to discuss a programme and format which suits your company’s needs and wishes.
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